Mother River

$17.95

January 21, 2025
stories | pb | 256 pgs.
5.5" x 8.5"
978-1-960385-31-4

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award

The thirteen stories in this collection are vintage Can Xue. Similar to her novels (The Last Lover, Frontier) and other collections (Vertical Motion) the focus is less on what happens and more on the experience of reading.

"Mother River" is a short bildungsroman of a young man who decides to become a fisherman (and crafter of spherical maps) and discovers that performing the role itself is more important than the number of fish they catch.

Surreal, provocative, and unique, Mother River reinforces Can Xue's status as one of the most rewarding and complex writers working today—and a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize.

Translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

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About the Author:

Can Xue is the pseudonym of celebrated experimental writer Deng Xiaohua, born in 1953 in the city of Changsha. She is the author of Vertical Motion, Frontier, Barefoot Doctor, and Five Spice Street, among other books.

About the Translators:

Karen Gernant is a professor emerita of Chinese history at Southern Oregon University.

Chen Zeping was professor emeritus of Chinese linguistics and a specialist in the Fuzhou Dialect, at Fujian Normal University.

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Praise for Can Xue:

“There’s a new world master among us and her name is Can Xue.”—Robert Coover

“If China has one possibility of a Nobel laureate it is Can Xue.”—Susan Sontag

“There’s something inescapably cosmic about [Can Xue’s] writing: the grandness of her vision, the abstraction of her thought, the way the details of lived reality seem to shrink and assume an equal significance, as though one were orbiting a distant star and peering down.”—Bailey Trela, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Can Xue is a master at twisting philosophical ideas into realities that seem simple but are incredibly thoughtful and intricate.”—Emily Park, Booklist